Heartfire: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume V (5 page)

Arthur Stuart nodded, and walked to the point where the bank was highest. But before calling the geese, he turned to face Audubon one last time. “Where do you want the bird to stand?”

Audubon laughed. “You are the very strange boy! This is what you Americans call ‘the brag’?”

“He ain’t bragging,” said Alvin. “He really has to know where you want the goose to stand.”

Audubon shook his head, then looked around, checked the angle of the sun, and where there was a shady spot where he could sit while painting. Only then could he point to where the bird would have to pose.

“All right,” said Arthur Stuart. He faced the river and babbled again, loudly, the sound carrying across the water. The geese rose from the surface and flew rapidly to shore, landing in the water or on the meadow. The lead
goose, however, landed near Arthur Stuart, who led it toward the spot Audubon had picked.

Arthur looked at the Frenchman impatiently. He was just standing there, mouth agape, watching the goose come into position and then stop there, standing still as a statue. “You gonna draw in the mud with a stick?” asked Arthur.

Only then did Audubon realize that his paper and colors were still in his sack. He jogged briskly to the bag, stopping now and then to look back over his shoulder and make sure the goose was still there. While he was out of earshot, Alvin asked Arthur, “You forget we were leaving Philadelphia this morning?”

Arthur looked at him with the expression of withering scorn that only the face of an adolescent can produce. “You can go anytime you like.”

At first Alvin thought he was telling him to go on and leave Arthur behind. But then he realized that Arthur was merely stating the truth: Alvin could leave Philadelphia whenever he wanted, so it didn’t matter if it was this morning or later. “Verily and Mike are going to get worried if we don’t get back soon.”

“I don’t want no birds to die,” said Arthur.

“It’s God’s job to see every sparrow fall,” said Alvin. “I didn’t hear about him advertising that the position was open.”

Arthur just clammed up and said no more. Soon Audubon was back, sitting in the grass under the tree, mixing his colors to match the exact color of the goose-feathers.

“I want to watch you paint,” said Arthur.

“I don’t like having people look over my shoulder.”

Arthur murmured something and the goose started to wander away.

“All right!” said Audubon frantically. “Watch me paint, watch the bird, watch the sun in the sky until you will be blind, whatever you want!”

At once Arthur Stuart muttered to the goose, and it waddled back into place.

Alvin shook his head. Naked extortion. How could this be the sweet-tempered child Alvin had known for so long?

Peggy spent the morning trying not to dread her meeting with Lady Guinevere Ashworth. As one of the senior ladies-in-waiting to Queen Mary she had some influence in her own right; more importantly, she was married to the Lord Chancellor, William Ashworth, who might have been born the third son of a schoolteacher, but by wit, dazzle, and enormous energy had clawed his way to a fine education, a good marriage, and a high office. Lord William had no illusions about his own parentage: He took his wife’s family’s name upon marrying her.

A woman is a woman, regardless of her parents’ rank or her husband’s office, Peggy reminded herself. When Lady Ashworth’s bladder was full, angels didn’t miraculously turn it into wine and bottle it, though from the way her name was spoken throughout Camelot, one might have thought so. It was a level of society Peggy had never aspired to or even been interested in. She hardly knew the proper manner of address to a daughter
of a marquis—and whenever Peggy thought that she ought to make inquiries, she forced herself to remember that as a good Republican, she
should
get it wrong, and ostentatiously so. After all, both Jefferson and Franklin invariably referred to the King as “Mr. Stuart,” and even addressed him as such on official correspondence between heads of state—though the story was that clerks in the ministry of state “translated” all such letters so that proper forms of address appeared on them, thus avoiding an international incident.

And if there was any hope of averting the war that loomed among the American nations, it might well rest on her interview with Lady Ashworth. For along with her lofty social position—some said the Queen herself consulted Lady Ashworth for advice on how to dress—Lady Ashworth was also leader of the most prominent anti-slavery organization in the Crown Colonies: Ladies Against Property Rights in Persons. (According to the fashion in the Crown Colonies, the organization was commonly called Lap-Rip, from the initials of its name—a most unfortunate acronym, Peggy thought, especially for a ladies’ club.)

So much might be riding on this morning’s meeting. Everything else had been a dead end. After all her months in Appalachee, Peggy had finally realized that all the pressure for maintaining slavery in the New Counties was coming from the Crown Colonies. The King’s government was rattling sabers, both figuratively and literally, to make sure the Appalachian Congress understood exactly what abolition of slavery would cost them in blood. In the meantime, union between Appalachee and the United States of America was impossible as long as slavery was legal anywhere within Appalachee. And the simplest compromise, to allow the proslavery New Counties of Tennizy, Cherriky, and Kenituck to secede from Appalachee, was politically impossible in Appalachee itself.

The outcome Peggy most feared was that the United
States would give in and admit the New Counties as slaveholding States. Such a pollution of American freedom would destroy the United States, Peggy was sure of it. And secession of the New Counties was only slightly more acceptable to her, since it would leave most of the Blacks of Appalachee under the overseer’s lash. No, the only way to avoid war while retaining a spark of decency among the American people was to persuade the Crown Colonies to allow the whole of Appalachee, New Counties and all, to form a union with the United States of America—with slavery illegal throughout the nation that would result.

Her abolitionist friends laughed when Peggy broached this possibility. Even her husband, Alvin, sounded doubtful in his letters, though of course he encouraged her to do as she thought right. After hundreds of interviews with men and women throughout Appalachee and for the last few weeks in Camelot, Peggy had plenty of doubts of her own. And yet as long as there was a thread of hope, she would try to tat it into some sort of bearable future. For the future she saw in the heartfires of the people around her could not be borne, unless she knew she had done her utmost to prevent the war that threatened to soak the soil of America in blood, and whose outcome was by no means certain.

So, dread it as she might, Peggy had no choice but to visit with Lady Ashworth. For even if she could not enlist Lady Ashworth and her Lap-Rip club in the cause of emancipation, she might at least win an introduction to the King, so she could plead her cause with the monarch directly.

The idea of meeting with the King frightened her less than the prospect of meeting Lady Ashworth. To an educated man Peggy could speak directly, in the language they understood. But Southern ladies, Peggy already knew, were much more complicated. Everything you said meant something else to them, and everything they said meant anything but the plain meaning of the words.
It was a good thing they didn’t let Southern ladies go to college. They were far too busy learning arcane languages much more subtle and difficult to master than mere Greek and Latin.

Peggy slept little the night before, ate little that morning, and kept down even less. The most acute nausea from her pregnancy had passed, but when she was nervous, as she was this morning, it returned with a vengeance. The spark of life in the baby in her womb was just beginning to be visible to her. Soon she would be able to see something of the baby’s future. Mere glimpses, for a baby’s heartfire was chaotic and confusing, but it would become real to her then, a life. Let it be born into a better world than this one. Let my labors change the futures of all the babies.

Her fingers were weak and trembly as she tried to fasten her buttons; she was forced to ask the help of the slavegirl who was assigned to her floor in the boarding-house. Like all slaves in the Crown Colonies, the girl would not meet Peggy’s gaze or even face her directly, and while she answered softly but clearly every question Peggy asked, what passed between them could hardly be called a conversation. “I’m sorry to trouble you, but will you help me fasten my buttons?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“My name is Peggy. What’s yours?”

“I’s Fishy, ma’am.”

“Please call me Peggy.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Don’t belabor the point. “Fishy? Really? Or is that a nickname?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Which?”

“Fishy, ma’am.”

She must be refusing to understand; let it go. “Why would your mother give you such a name?”

“I don’t know, ma’am.”

“Or was it your mother who named you?”

“I don’t know, ma’am.”

“If I give you a tip for your service, do you get to keep it?”

“No tips please, ma’am.”

“But if you were to find a penny in the street, would you be permitted to keep it as your own?”

“Never found no penny, ma’am. All done now, ma’am.” And Fishy was out the door in a heartbeat, pausing in the doorway only long enough to say, “Anything else, ma’am?”

Peggy knew the answers to her questions, of course, for she saw into the woman’s heartfire. Saw how Fishy’s mother had shunted her off on other slavewomen, because she could hardly attract the master’s lust with a baby clinging to her thighs. And when the woman grew too slack-bellied from her repeated pregnancies, how the master began to share her with his White visitors, and finally with the White overseers, until the day the master gave her to Cur, the Black foreman of the plantation craftsmen. The shame of being reduced to whoring with Blacks was too much for Fishy’s mother and she hanged herself. It was Fishy who found her. Peggy saw all of that flash through Fishy’s mind when Peggy asked about her mother. But it was a story Fishy had never told and would never tell.

Likewise, Peggy saw that Fishy got her name from the son of the first owner she was sold to after her mother’s suicide. She was assigned to be his personal maid, and the senior maid in the plantation house told her that meant that she must do
whatever
the master’s son told her to do. What that might have meant Fishy never knew. The boy took one look at her, declared that she smelled fishy, and wouldn’t let her in his room. She was reassigned to other duties for the months that she remained in the house, but the name Fishy stuck, and when she was sold into a household in the city of Camelot, she took the name Fishy with her. It was better than the one her mother had given her: Ugly Baby.

As for tipping, if any slave in this house were found with money, it was assumed that it had been stolen and the slave would be stripped and branded and chained in the yard for a week. Slaves might walk with their heads downcast, but in this house, at least, they saw no pennies on the ground.

The worst frustration for Peggy, though, was that she couldn’t say to the slave, “Fishy, do not despair. You feel powerless, you
are
powerless except for your sullen contempt, your deliberate slothfulness, the tiny rebellions that you can carry out and still survive. But there are some of us, many of us working to try to set you free.” For even if Peggy said it, why should Fishy believe a White woman? And if she did believe, what should she do then? If her behavior changed one iota from this obsequiousness, she would suffer for it, and emancipation, when and if it came, was still many years away.

So Peggy bore Fishy’s unspoken scorn and hatred, though she knew she did not deserve it.
Her black skin makes her a slave in this country; and therefore my white skin makes me her enemy, for if she took the slightest liberty with me and addressed me with anything like friendship or equality, she would risk terrible suffering
.

It was at moments like these that Peggy thought that her fire-eating abolitionist friends in Philadelphia might be right: Only blood and fire could purge America of this sin.

She shrugged off the thought, as she always did. Most of the people who collaborated in the degradation of Blacks did so because they knew no better, or because they were weak and fearful. Ignorance, weakness, and fear led to great wrongs, but they were not in themselves sins, and could often be more profitably corrected than punished. Only those whose hearts delighted in the degradation of the helpless and sought out opportunities to torment their Black captives deserved the blood and horror
of war. And war was never so careful as to inflict suffering only where it was merited.

Buttoned now, Peggy would go to meet Lady Ashworth and see if the light of Christianity burned in the heartfire of a lady-in-waiting.

There were carriages for hire in the streets of Camelot, but Peggy had no money to spare for such luxury. The walk wasn’t bad, as long as she stayed away from King’s Street, which had so much horse traffic that you couldn’t tell there were cobbles under the dung, and flecks of it were always getting flipped up onto your clothes. And of course she would never walk along Water Street, because the smell of fish was so thick in the air that you couldn’t get it out of your clothes for days afterward, no matter how long you aired them out.